My Kind of Town

Walla Walla, Washington is not usually a vacation destination. It's best known, perhaps, for its onions. Ann and I traveled there for our spring break, however, and the visit was fabulous.

We stayed at a B and B, Maxwell House, about a block from campus and within walking distance of downtown. The hostess, Penny, is relaxed and helpful and makes a pretty and substantial breakfast. Penny is helpful and there when you need her, but we didn't feel like we were vacationing with her like we do in some B and Bs. The home was built in 1904, and Penny's antiques are interesting and practical. There's a gaslog fire in the living room and cookies in the cookie jar. The home feels like a home and not an antique mall. If you go to Walla Walla, you should stay at the Maxwell House.

People move slowly in Walla Walla. When I approached a corner, planning to cross the street, any onconing drivers stopped a good ten yards from the cross walk, leaving me no doubt that they saw me. When I made it to the other side of the street, the driver waited a few seconds before moving slowly on: there was no gunning of the motor to let me know that this driver was in a hurry and irritated that I had slowed the day.

At stop lights, I never feared for my life when I crossed in the cross walk, as invited by the man in white lights. Drivers watched for me. Not some of them. All of them.

There's public art everywhere. Whitman College, a small private college, has an art sculpure walk around campus. We saw a colorful rectangle divided into perfect ratios (Math Teacher Ann took lots of photos there); a giant colorful carving of Venus de Milo, and a great stick horse ridden by a weary looking plastic bag cowboy. (It was prank week.) That's just a few highlights. In town, my favorite sculpture was a frog looking reflectively at a fountain, fist to chin in "The Thinker" pose.

We visited wineries, just a few among the 178 or so, and basked in the sun as we sipped red wines. Our B&B moved at just the right pace, too. Big breakfasts (I'm back to my post-Christmas weight) at a leisurely 9 am, and chocolate chip cookies in the cookie jar for the taking.

Like the poet Theodore Roethke, "I wake to sleep and take my waking slow." In Walla Walla, I could take my walking slow, too.